


Our Hearts Condemn Us

by oisiflaneur



Series: RVB SEMICANON [1]
Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-14
Updated: 2015-01-14
Packaged: 2018-03-07 13:03:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,089
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3174440
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oisiflaneur/pseuds/oisiflaneur
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She changed you when she came into your life, and she changed you when she left it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Our Hearts Condemn Us

**Author's Note:**

> the director looks back on his life and the path that led him to a bunker on a backwater planet: or, i try to resolve the versions of church that act and sound completely different and it gets entirely out of hand. title is from the _only lovers left alive_ OST because I had it on repeat while editing this, basically. i am tired and uninspired and want only to make you cry.
> 
> and the tags are iffy sometimes, so here's the **full trigger list:** alcohol mentions, death, parental abuse (mostly neglect), ptsd, suicide  & ideation, and spoilers for RVB up to season twelve at least. i think that's all, but please let me know if i missed anything!
> 
>  **EDITED 12/01/16:** i can't believe this is the second edit note i'm having to write for this, why am i such chex trash. anyway so the fanbook jossed a lot of this, but i wanted to come back and make sure that the chronicle of my previously existing headcanons was as good as possible. i also finished up [the soundtrack for it](https://8tracks.com/oisiflaneur/our-hearts-condemn-us), because i like to listen to music while i weep into my palms! so enjoy the latest edition of Diary of a Sad Bad Dad.
> 
> my general writing tag is [here](http://oisiflaneur.tumblr.com/tagged/graywrites) for drabbles etc!

Allison changed you. More than puberty, more than “becoming a man”, more than high school; which you can admit is strange, since she came after all of that. She was a late introduction to your story, but the effect she had was like a last minute shot of adrenaline. Allison was the factor that didn’t change your life, she changed _you_.

When you’d met her, it was as a fully fledged adult, new to the capitol and trying to suppress what you thought of as a hick accent. You were, you admit, not very good at it.

You were — _are_ — still an asshole, and you’d be the first to admit that. You’d always been abrasive; you’d always been the first to take offense and get his hackles up. But she eased that, made it _acceptable_ , somehow. Maybe it was just relative. Maybe it was just by being on guard for an even heftier percentage of her day than you were. Maybe it was just that she got angrier even faster than you, took the role of aggressor, so that you could take the role of “holding back the idiot who’s spitting with rage by pinning her elbows and pleading for her to calm down”, instead of being that idiot. Maybe it was just that she let you look like the reasonable one, for once.

And you learned pretty early that pinning her elbows back and pleading for her to calm down was generally the smartest course of action when she got _that_ look, even those times that you agreed with her. _Especially_ those times that you agreed with her. When you worked together — for lack of a better word — the situation tended to spiral out of control almost instantly. So you accepted your apparent fate of being the boring one, her sidekick, and resigned yourself to strained wrists and the disappointed tone when she called you a wet blanket.

There were a few nights where you might’ve questioned whether it was worth it. You’re hardly proud of them, but you also know that there were a few instances that would have made somebody else walk away and never look back. That night spent in the back of a cop cruiser, for instance. She always thought that just because her daddy was in good with the police, she’d get off scotfree. She didn’t really take _you_ into account, at least not when the captain pulled her over with ten dollar whiskey still heavy on her breath.

When she spat on the officer’s chin, you’d sunk down in the passenger seat and tried your hardest to stifle the cheer in your throat, stomping down the urge to egg her on.

But on the other hand, there were the nights that made it _definitely_ worth it, like the ones you spent lounging around in the cemetery above the highway. It hadn’t taken long for what she referred to as “the park” to become your default hangout spot after you got out of classes. Especially not after Allison had shrugged off your protests of disrespect by laughing that she hoped that when she was dead, cool young alive people (like her, you’d cut in drily) would hang around _her_ grave and lighten things up a bit. You refrained from sharing your immediate thoughts on the matter: namely, that you hoped you’d be buried next to her. It was too much, too fast, and you two were just young idiots with crushes, right? Right.

You’d ended up there, as usual, the night she got her confirmed deployment date. And as usual, you’d slumped down against the edge of the gazebo and started with your quotidian venting, if only to let you cling to some sense of normalcy. When you heard “Hey. Leonard,” and looked up, there had been only her, perched on the gazebo railing. Even when you think that you can’t remember the details of her — the worst days, when her features go fuzzy — you can remember that image of her. Just the outline of her silhouette: a paper cutout blocking out the stars, strands of hair that escaped her ponytail twisting in the breeze to break her profile, the whole postcard picture framed with the black clusters of leaves. It’s one of those moments that was burnt indelibly into your memory. “When I ship out, you don’t get to come see me off or anything sappy like that, alright? I don’t know why, but I hate goodbyes.” 

And you’d nodded mutely and filed it away, under “facts about Allison”, and when her proud dad drove her to the local base, you’d stayed at home and paced anxiously instead of tagging along.

The tours were hard, but in the end, like with everything else, she was worth it. As lonely as it was — prickly since middle school, you never really had many other friends — you knew that just the promise of her company was enough. The rare weekends on leave, spent in your own backyard instead of the graveyard or a real park, were enough. You would complain at her about the boredom of working longer hours on your degree while she was gone, she would croon that it must be sooooo haaaard be stuck in a fancy university where nobody tries to shoot you and nobody ever steps on a land mine, and thing would feel almost normal again. It was enough. There were good days.

You also learned to shut up sometimes, to sit a little closer on the couch — but not too close if she jumped — to rub circles on the backs of her wrists with the pads of your thumbs and mumble stanzas of her favorite songs, on the bad days. 

So the war had ended and she’d come home, permanently, _thank god_. You’d started to pay off the house, had _the fucking most cutest daughter in the world_ , as you’d said when you all came home from the hospital. Maternity leave didn’t exactly suit Allison, so you were content to work on your coding and philosophy from home, while she worked her way up the military ladder. And as mundane as those years were, you came to appreciate them fiercely for both the serenity and the brevity. Mathematically speaking it was a reasonable fraction of your lifespan, but it seemed to pass so quickly, and the years since have dragged so wearily. When the great war broke out, Allison had been looking into a career at the CIA, something you’d argued about, until the arguments turned to the subject of the clearly impending draft. Your girl was only a few years old; just old enough to kick your ass at fighting games, but nowhere near as good as her mother.

She’d thrown the wireless controller across the room in a fury, and promised that when Allison came back, she’d be able to beat her, no matter what. _Even if_ ma picked Chun Li.

You hadn’t taken Allison to the base that time, either, telling yourself that it was stupid to cling and try to squeeze every minute you could out of her when she would be back in six months. Or nine months. Or a year. Like she kept telling you, just because the opponent was vastly different, that didn’t mean that the job was. Not being able to see the whites of their eyes was going to be the biggest change, she joked; so stop _fussing_ , Leonard.

_Don’t worry, you’ll see me again._

But the enemy was different this time -- _alien_ , you could even say, if you had a dark sense of humor -- and all the weapons technology was brand new. And the officer who showed up on the porch of you “modest but lovely home” (small bungalow, and you knew full well you were too lazy and cranky without her to deal with the weeds) said that all the training in the world couldn’t have improved her judgement. _And_ , well, separated from the rest of her squad, what could you expect? It was a miracle that she’d lasted as long as she did. You’d slammed the door in his face, but surprisingly, that didn’t make you feel much better. Neither did cracking open the liquor cabinet, but calling your daughter in from school and digging out her old copy of _Marvel Vs. Capcom_ did, just a fraction. That evening on the couch was one of the last ones that you spent the entirety of together, and sometimes you wish that perhaps it hadn’t ended with both of you sobbing when the distraction — and in your case, the buzz — wore off. 

Because even when she wasn’t there, Allison was _always_ on you mind, in your thoughts, nestled at the back of your skull.

She changed you when she came into your life, and she changed you when she left it.

You’d signed up for the same war pretty much immediately. Everything was shifting too fast, not just for you but for humanity wrestling with the ultimate midlife crisis that was the confirmation that _we are not alone_. And besides, you told yourself that earth didn’t really have anything left for you. 

By the time you were sent offplanet, you hadn’t played video games together in a long time, and your daughter didn’t seem to object to staying with her grandparents indefinitely. You kissed her forehead and swallowed the _goodbye_ rising in your throat like bile, settling for a _see you later._ But from the look on her face, she had known that you didn’t truly expect to.

The war had left chaos in its wake, along with fear and uncertainty about humanity’s future. Ultimately, first contact had been as traumatic for the species at large as it had been for you: you still hadn’t burnt out your anger, hadn’t hurt them enough for taking her. Looking back, maybe you hadn’t hurt yourself enough for letting them. Whatever the reason, your daughter was right, and you never went back to earth. The ghosts you were chasing didn’t lurk in the dark beneath the stairs, but the spaces in between the stars. 

You never actually saw combat; which was probably for the best, given how much Allison teased you the few times she deigned to take you to the range. You’d still been in that phase where you didn’t want to _broadcast_ your nerddom, and without your glasses, you were always a fucking lousy shot. Maybe you would have been more useful with the targeting suggestions and lock that was provided to most soldiers via their helmets, but you got pushed out of basic shortly after an exercise that you spent almost the entirety of soaked in mud and stuck up a tree, yowling like an angry feline. No, service in the field was simply not for you, the sargeant said as he stamped your transfer papers, but the war was eating through the ranks faster than expected, and didn’t you say you had some fancy engineer schooling? It turned out that about the only thing that a masters in theoretical robotics was good for at that point was glorified shipboard tech support: the weapons division was less concerned with artificial intelligence than artificial obedience. 

But you’d done your job, kept things professional when you bothered to talk to people, and slowly climbed the ranks. The higherups liked your attitude, liked that you threw yourself into the work and didn’t ask too many questions. You stopped trying to hide your accent. The years passed, and you discovered that keeping your head down and following the rules got you a lot farther, a _lot_ faster, than digging your heels in and hissing at every superior. And under your supervision, the tech department had evolved into something almost like a think tank. When the UNSC finally realized that they needed a new kind of operating system for the weapons they were developing — since artificial _obedience_ isn’t very good at thinking for itself, it’s not very good at anticipating what the human operator might want, and the applications in the field were limited if you didn’t want your soldiers cooking inside their own armor — you were the one who suggested investigating the practical applications of artificial _intelligence_ in the field. By the time project Freelancer was approved, you’d easily amassed enough personal respect (and not to mention favors) that being put in charge only needed a few unlogged meetings and one welltimed giftbasket. There weren’t exactly too many people lining up for the position, after all. Despite knowing that the UNSC had the entire human race available as a draft pool, you were genuinely surprised when they said that the limit to your test subjects was fifty. You realized soon enough that they’d been expecting for you to burn through the majority of them: as long as there was one result that could be replicated and packaged, the experiment would be called a success. Well, if _that_ was how they wanted to play it. These soldiers had to be the best, after all, with the threats they were facing. 

You barely recognized her when she appeared on the floor, two decades older and suddenly ginger. She was a fullgrown adult, scowling at you and here not because you’d dragged her along but because she was old enough to _decide_ to chase you. You recognized that voice, the low growling timbre of _reporting for duty, sir_ when she straightened her shoulders and saluted and stared up at you on the observation deck. That was your girl, alright. 

You figured that stubbornness just ran in the family.

When you assigned her title as Carolina (too easy? perhaps. too sentimental? certainly, at this point. you did it anyway, because Allison would have thought it was _funny_.), the councilman had raised an eyebrow and asked if that would not get confusing with the currently registered agents North and South. After all, what if you later decided to add another one?

“There isn’t going to _be_ another one.”

Even if Allison _had_ wanted a bigger family.

The Alpha had been your idea. Or, rather, using your own brain as the blueprint instead of a volunteer’s had been your idea. There was a certain appeal to it, a copy of yourself without real feelings, without consequences, that could help with the heavy lifting. Looking back, maybe you thought you could grieve through it. Looking back, maybe you thought that it’d give you somebody to talk to. The answer could be any of them, or all of them: it feels like there are so many years in your life, some days you think you split your own mind apart instead of the copy.

You were genuinely surprised when the program sniped back at you with your old intonation, with no drawl. With the same clipped tones you tried briefly in college, when you were trying to hide it. Like you had been when you’d met her.

When you came into being, you suppose. In retrospect, it all made a grim kind of sense.

Or, maybe your technology wasn’t advanced enough to properly copy regional dialects. The _why_ of the minute differences didn’t really matter at this point, only the fact that it was using that voice to cuss the air bluer than its holographic projection did. It was abrasive and cocky and had none of your hard earned experience or sense of decorum, and perhaps you resented it a little for that. 

But frustrating or not, the Alpha was useful; you saw that potential immediately. You had plans in motion for it already, perhaps letting agent Carolina test its combat functionality. Of course, any and all plans dissolved like spring ice as soon as the Beta appeared.

The lurch in the pit of your stomach was predominantly guilt, but for some reason centered around its name: how _dare_ you give her the secondary designation, _you_ were supposed to be the sidekick. But the label stuck, and _she_ stuck, preserved the way the Alpha remembered her, before she finished her first major tour. Trapped in amber and unable to recognize you but _there_ , drawling at you with the same bored tones she always had.

You got very good, _very_ quickly, at suppressing any outward sign that it felt like a knife in your gut every time.

So, your plans changed, like they always did when Allison showed up. You were well versed in the rules, the council had made sure of that; not that they had to, you’d _written_ half of them. But, in the end, that only meant that you knew how to bend them. 

One copy wasn’t enough to accomplish what you wanted with the program — or what _they_ wanted, ultimately, but that was their problem to wrestle with now — and it wasn’t as though the A.I.’s emotions were anything more meaningful than binary. The method to the madness was simple enough to discover. It was, after all, essentially the same as what had driven _you_ crazy.

The programs came faster after that. All of them achingly, awkwardly familar, and none of them you would wish on anyone else. But you had already come _so far_ , and as long as you gave the council results, you could keep observing the Beta. Keep raking yourself over the coals with the sound of her voice, flanged and half a decade younger than you last remember but still utterly _her._

Until Connecticut, of course. She wasn’t the first or only wrench in your cogs by any means, but she was the first setback that you never _quite_ managed to overcome. Even now, you _still_ aren’t sure how she managed to get your files, though you had your suspicions about who had been paying her. Regardless, everything started to spiral out of control after that, and agent Texas was the greatest loss. All over again. And then the Alpha, and then the entire project. At the very least, you managed to scrub the Alpha of any recollection of the project before the UNSC had come for what was left of the Mother of Invention, managed to make sure that it would have no idea who or what it was, no way to point anyone towards your safehouse. So that was one loss that you managed to mitigate by a fraction, unlike agent Texas.

And Carolina, of course, but even _you_ aren't _that_ stupid (like she used to chime from the backseat). You know you lost her years ago -- you’ve come to terms with it, even. You’ve had to. She’s just another casualty of the war. 

Not the Great War, you, don’t have any illusions about that. Not now. No; while it’s possible for you to lay the blame for your loss of Allison at the feet of the elusive, allpowerful, inhuman enemy, you know better than that when it comes to Agent Carolina. You can’t even blame agent Maine. She was a victim of your personal war: you have no one to blame but yourself. 

And yet, having known her, you aren’t surprised at all that she survived.

Her arrival — _their_ arrival — feels more like a _sign_ than a real interruption. You’re tired, the kind of tired that moves beyond feeling fullbody and starts feeling full _being_ , and it’s been harder and harder to rouse yourself and get back to work when your suspicions have been growing regarding the futility of your project. Your days feel like an endless cycle of waking, coding, testing, watching, swearing, coding, testing, swearing, coding, and finally crashing. You don’t remember anything else. You’ve been caught on loop, the same way your final home video has been.

You can’t help but wonder sometimes, what the differences would be if the Alpha had been a direct copy of _her_ , and _your_ digital homunculus had been the one that was pieced together from exterior memories. Maybe that would have been the only way to have gotten her _right_. The Alpha might be a freezeframe from the first reel of your life, but at least you can tell that it’s an accurate one, since he’s pieced together from you.

And it’s truly unfortunate that he’s not the one you _needed_ to be accurate, at the end of the day. You’d thought that the failured copies would at least serve as better guards.

“Hello, agent Carolina. Would you like to watch this file with me?”

The disappointment in her voice doesn’t sting as much as you thought it would. You suppose you always knew what she would think of you once she found out.

“I just need a bit more time.”

_You’ve **had** your fucking time!_

You’re too exhausted to be anything but distantly cordial with the reflection, but can’t make eye contact — the screen in front of you is still more important.

“Hello, Epsilon. You came all this way just to see me?” 

You listen to his list of grievances, strangely comforted that the urge to slam your fist on the table when he calls agent Texas a _shadow_ has been worn away by time and the irony of his own existence. Something that may once have been mistaken for a smile tugs at the corner of your lips when he ends his tirade with _he needs to pay_ , you have to stop yourself from laughing in his projected face. What exactly does he think you’ve been doing, all this time?

You never needed your glasses to see up close, despite the warnings you heard all throughout adolescence in regards to burning your eyes out while staring at screens. You need them for anything further than a few feet, you need them to absorb all the details of Allison’s face in 1024x768p — over and over again — but you don’t need them to see your daughter’s face one last time. And when she takes her helmet off for you, it seems only right.

_Don’t worry. You’ll see me again._

Even now, it seems, she can’t stay angry at you for long. There’s a piece of you that’s still dully surprised when she announces that they’re leaving, but there’s not a single part of you that feels startled when the program says that the intent of their visit was your termination. You had rather been hoping for it. You listen to them argue for a moment, staring at the frames dangling from your fingertips.

_You need to let go. Your past doesn’t define who you are. It just gives you the starting point for who you’re going to be._

Maybe she’s right. But you already know who you are, and that’s _nothing._ You were always nothing without her.

“Agent Carolina. Would you be so kind as to leave me your pistol?”

You can tell by the tiny flicker of hesitation in her wrist that she understands, but she complies without looking you in the eyes.

“Thank you, Carolina.”

_Goodbye, sir._

You swallow the stinging in your chest at her apparent unwillingness — or inability — to call you anything else, and wait for Epsilon to stop lingering.

“You were my greatest creation.”

It’s almost funny that he thinks you’re referring to him when you mumble after her; and of course he has to get his final twist of the knife in. You would only do the same in his position, wouldn’t you. It may not be particularly conventional, but it’s easier than _I love you_ and better than _goodbye_. 

You have no words left for Epsilon. He knows how you feel about him: he must. He’s here to remember what you did, after all.

You leave the firearm where she placed it on the table, staring ahead once more. The request had largely for show; to make your intentions clear, to let her know that the job will get done, even if she doesn’t do it. You wouldn’t want her to think that all that work and struggle and suffering had been in vain. They _did_ come all this way just to see you. But you have to shut down FILSS anyway, and that means shutting down the life support in the bunker you’ve called home. You rather wish that you could preserve her, but there must be backups at other secure locations, if not on the ship. After a decade or so of breaking the rules, you may as well start now, right? And even if it wasn’t part of protocol, shutting down the oxygen is easier, more comfortable, and considerably less dramatic. 

“Shut them all down. Lock me in.”

Besides: without your glasses, you were always a fucking lousy shot.


End file.
